The basics of sponsorship at Crossref

By Rachael Lammey

Image adapted from the original, by opensource.com.

At Crossref, we want to make sure that organizations who want to participate in our services can do so. We also know that small publishers find certain aspects of Crossref membership difficult, and we want to help with that.

Crossref has thousands of individual members from around the globe. However, a growing number our members are organizations who work with or publish on behalf of groups of smaller organizations that want to register content. We call these members sponsors, and we have two categories of sponsor: Sponsoring Members and Sponsoring Organizations.

Both types of sponsor work directly with Crossref to help their sponsored members and organizations deposit metadata. They also provide administrative, billing, technical and language support for such things such as:

• Specific email/phone/WhatsApp support at their organization;
• Educational seminars (online and in person);
• Ability to pay in the local currency;
• Custom systems to support content registration.

Some sponsors charge for these services, and some provide them as part of their wider remit. The organizations each sponsor works with usually fit into a certain category (maybe a specific subject category, geographic area or user-group).

In Brazil Crossref has nearly 800 members, an impressive number (in total, Crossref has over 10,500 members). Nearly 650 of the 800 Brazil members are represented by a sponsor, SciELO and Associação Brasileira de Editores Científicos (ABEC) being the largest.

We think that working with sponsors gives many organizations the opportunity to become Crossref members when they may not be able to do so alone. You can see a full list of our sponsors on the Crossref website, and can contact them if you want to explore participating in this way.

It is a two way process of course, and at Crossref we work hard to support our sponsors, by running LIVE local events, and other outreach activities with them. We also listen to their feedback about what they need from us. Every year each Sponsoring Organization updates us with information about the services they are providing to their sponsors, and as part of this report they let us know what they need from Crossref – more education, specific resources, advice on a certain problem and what we might consider doing in cooperation with each other. This provides important insights for us, that we might otherwise miss.

We hope that by working together with trusted organizations, we can better support our members, and help all organizations take full advantage of many useful Crossref services.

This blog is the fourth in a series of five posts from Crossref; over the next few months we’ll be talking to them more in depth about the role of the DOI, particularly in terms of

• how DOI and Crossref came to be,
• visibility and interoperability,
• the identification of different content versions of an article such as preprints, formats and languages, and
• how journals can exploit DOIs using Crossref services.

External links

Crossref LIVE Locals <https://www.crossref.org/crossref-live-locals/>

Sponsors <https://www.crossref.org/community/sponsors/>

About Rachael Lammey

Rachael Lammey is Head of Community Outreach at Crossref, which involves running LIVE events for the community and helping publishers get the most out of their membership by doing more with their metadata. Rachael also enjoys working with Crossref’s funder, library, researcher and developer communities. Before that, she was a Product Manager at Crossref and previously worked in journals publishing for Taylor & Francis.